The Chinese Amazon Now Has Hookers Delivering Packages

Taobao is the Chinese equivalent of Amazon or eBay, with a couple hundred million users all selling each other random knick-knacks and bootleg electronics. Thanks to its massive potential customer base, Taobao is huge: CrunchBase claims that the site controls over 65% of the online auction market, and the Journal wrote that the site is shooting for more than $167 billion in sales this year.

So, yeah, Taobao is massive, and business is doing well. But the online shopping realm is hyper-competitive, which means Taobao canâ€™t afford to rest on its laurels. Thatâ€™s why, in a stroke of weird, creepy genius, Taobao is now offering a new shipping service. For 10 yuan (about $1.59) extra, customers can now have â€˜Tao Girlsâ€™ hand deliver their packages.

According to China Hush (sic),

Tao Girls (æ·˜å¥³éƒŽ) platform under Taobo (mm.taobao.com) officially went online on March 23rd, 2010. Tao Girls are girls who are active on Taobao since the yearly Tao Girl Competition started in 2007 to todayâ€™s Tao Girls Platform. Tao Girls today has developed into a platform of Internet models where beautiful girls show off their beauty and outfits as well as posting their prices of Internet modeling and waiting to be hired. While creating stylish and influential Internet popular figures and talented people, it also let major brands on Taobao and media find their shopsâ€™ suitable spokesperson.

Currently â€œTao Girlâ€ platform has over 40,000 members, scattered in various cities across the country. Large number of them is in Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen etc. where e-commerce is highly developed, as a lot of Taobao merchants are also in these cities.

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Looking at the site, there are certainly a lot of model shots of alluring delivery women, as well as some rather obvious profiles of girls dressed up as brides. And thatâ€™s the point of it, isnâ€™t it? For just an extra buck or two, you get to pretend that your lovely, caring wife just picked up a couple of your favorite kung-fu DVDs on her way home, rather than having them shipped UPS. Itâ€™s a hilarious take on the girlfriend experience offered by some escorts, with eye candy helping you pretend for just a moment that youâ€™re actually in a caring relationship.

Actually, that comparison may be more adept than it seems. The Tao Girl site is set up more like an escort service than anything. How, for a couple bucks a girl, is it fiscally possible to develop a whole new platform, replete with model shoots, just so people can pick exactly what girl they want for a delivery? If the service was legit, itâ€™d be a hell of a lot cheaper and more feasible to just have random girls do the deliveries like normal delivery people, rather than having them available a la carte. China Hush points to a Weibo comment in which someone states the obvious â€” the service canâ€™t possibly make money â€” and the unseemly: apparently, after making an order and choosing home-delivery service, users get a message asking if the customer needs â€œextra service.â€ It looks, then, that Taobao isnâ€™t trying to push more into the auction market; they just want to replicate Backpage.com.